


Sing to me your legacy

by irisdouglasiana



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, asa lives, not 6b compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:13:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28939059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdouglasiana/pseuds/irisdouglasiana
Summary: Jormungandr took Ubbe,Asa tells Torvi after the storm has passed.I saw it.
Relationships: Torvi/Ubbe (Vikings) (past)
Kudos: 4





	Sing to me your legacy

**Author's Note:**

> Canon divergent from 6x13.

_Jormungandr took Ubbe_ , Asa tells Torvi later. _I saw it._

It all happened so quickly. Torvi cannot quite believe it afterwards, when the rain stops and the sun peeks out from behind the clouds. The storm had come in so fast, drenching them to the bone and tossing their poor ship around on the waves with such force that she feared the entire thing would break apart. From the other end of the boat, she could see Ubbe straining to steer from the stern when a massive wave broke over the side and knocked them all down, and when she had wiped the seawater from her eyes and sat up again she saw he had vanished.

“It was fate,” she says to Asa in disbelief. It must be. It cannot be.

She is still in a state of shock when somebody on the other boat spots land the next day. It is quickly apparent that this is not the golden land Othere spoke of, but she cannot bring herself to care. What does it matter if this is the golden land or not, if Ubbe is not there to see it with her? The bones of the man she loved rest at the bottom of the ocean and the fish nibble at his flesh. She did not even have the chance to tell him goodbye.

She numbly watches after Asa and baby Ragnar while the others bicker and draw their lines in the dirt. The soil is rocky and poor, and though there is fresh water she does not imagine much will grow in this place—but land is land, and as Kjetill points out, it is free for the taking. She neither likes Kjetill nor trusts him. She has known plenty of men like him before. With Ubbe gone, he believes there is no one who can stand in his way. He may be right: he could never be anyone of importance back in Kattegat, but in a place like this he can make himself a king.

As she expects, the fragile balance does not last for long. Kjetill is good at antagonizing the other settlers and one thing leads to another—his son Frodi dead over a whale carcass, a dozen more senselessly butchered, and the rest of them running back to the ship in panic. She practically throws a terrified Asa onto the boat and shouts at the men to start rowing. By the time the thumping of her heart has settled and Greenland has faded into the distance, a different kind of dread sets in. They have almost no food or water, and no sunstone to guide them. Othere says all will be well, but Torvi thinks in despair, _Ubbe, what are we supposed to do now?_

Ubbe does not answer. The gods do not answer. They drift and drift.

* * *

She soon loses count of how many days they are at sea. She watches the sun rise and set and she follows the path the moon takes across the sky, but hunger and thirst render the passage of time meaningless. One by one, she watches the others on the boat weaken and die. Baby Ragnar no longer cries and Asa curls up into a ball and hardly moves. As for herself, exhausted though she is, she can barely bring herself to sleep. All she can do is think and wait for the end.

One moonless night after about three weeks lost at sea, she fixes her gaze on Othere. He opens his eyes when he senses her watching but says nothing. This man had in turn frustrated and fascinated Ubbe, and finally, he had led him to his death with talk of the golden land. When they first met him in Iceland, he told them he was Viking, and then that he had been a Christian monk, and now he says he served in the guard of the Byzantine emperor. But she is certain he is not and never was any of these things.

“I know who you are, Ancient One,” she says.

The seer smiles at her toothlessly from under Othere’s hood. “Torvi the Wise.”

“What have we done that displeased the gods?” she asks. “Such disasters have befallen us. I thought it was Ubbe’s destiny to find this golden land and fulfill Ragnar’s dream. I thought my fate was tied to his, but he was swept away in the storm. I do not know what I am supposed to do without him. I cannot believe that the gods intend for us to starve on this boat.”

He lets out a wheezing chuckle. “Ah, poor Torvi. You see everything and understand nothing.”

“Then tell me,” she hisses. When she blinks, he has Othere’s face once again. She knows she will get nothing more out of him. She sighs and settles back against the frame of the boat, pressing her lips against Asa’s head. Asa has always been a quiet girl, but now she barely speaks since Ubbe died. There is nothing Torvi can say to console her. This child has already lost her older brothers and her grandmother, and she will not see her father again. Now Ubbe is gone too.

She falls into a restless half-sleep. In her dreams, she is still on this gods-forsaken boat, rolling with the waves. The clouds have come in and blocked out the stars. Huddled in the dark across from her, the chains clink around Margrethe’s wrists. She stares at Torvi with hate.

“Are you happy now?” Torvi asks her bitterly. “Ubbe is dead. Lagertha is dead. And I will die on this boat with my children.”

“You all left me,” Margrethe answers in a hollow voice. Her hair is a mass of tangles and dirt. Blood trickles from the corner of her mouth. “I know it was you who told Ubbe to leave me behind. Do you know what it was like to watch you ride away and never once look back? Do you know what it is like to be treated worse than an animal?”

“You threatened my children,” Torvi snaps. “If you had harmed them, I would have done far worse to you.”

“Your son Hali died in Lagertha’s care.” She nods at baby Ragnar, asleep in Torvi’s arms, and at Asa, curled up at her side. “Those two will die in your care. Not mine.”

It is the thing she is dreading the most. She will either watch the last of her children die, or she will die first and leave them orphaned. “Let me be, Margrethe,” she pleads. “What do you want from me now? What can I possibly give you?”

Margrethe starts to laugh. It is the laugh of a madwoman; the laugh of a person with nothing left to lose. It chills Torvi to the bone. “What do the dead want, Torvi?” she says, reaching out for her. “Nothing that the living can offer them.”

Torvi jolts awake from her dream. Baby Ragnar is still in her arms and Asa is beside her, and Margrethe is long dead. She shuts her eyes again and tries to force herself back to sleep without success, but the creaking of the boat and the roll of the waves keep her awake. Her thoughts drift unwillingly back in the plains outside Kattegat, hiding out after Ivar’s victory over Lagertha and Bjorn. She had watched with her arms crossed as Ubbe shackled Margrethe’s wrists and led her to the pig pen. She hadn’t felt in the least bit sorry for her. She remembers thinking, _you should have been more grateful. If you had known your place, you wouldn’t be here._ Then she had gone to England with Ubbe and she did not think about Margrethe anymore. For the first time, she wonders, _what if I was wrong?_

When she was a girl, she had been terrified of ghosts. Her older sister used to tell her scary stories and tease her until she cried. Lying side by side in the dark, her sister whispered, _Mother tells you that ghosts are dead and cannot hurt you, but that is not true. Some ghosts are alive and walk among us. Maybe you are a ghost and you don’t even know it._ Torvi had kicked her and wailed, _I’m not a ghost, I’m not._ But as she looks around the boat at the last of the settlers Ubbe wanted to lead to the golden land, she knows now that her sister was right: the ghosts are the living, in all their ignorance and pride and fear. Did she become a ghost when she rode away from Margrethe all those years ago, or was it sometime before that?

She tilts her head back. The clouds have cleared and now the night sky is dotted with thousands of stars. The only sound she can hear is the gentle lapping of the waves against the sides of the boat. She reaches out to feel the damp boards of wood underneath her. It was a tree, once. It sprouted from a tiny seed and with enough rain and luck, it became a young sapling and over time its trunk grew thick and tall and strong, until at last a man saw it and thought it would make a fine piece of timber for a boat. He took an axe and chopped it down; he split it into boards and nailed them together and made the tree into something different. It did not die; it was transformed. And even after the man cut it down, its seeds still remained in the soil, resting patiently until the sky clouded over and the rain seeped into the soil and woke them from their long sleep.

Nothing ever really ends.

* * *

The golden land is not golden after all: it is gray and misty, a land of shadows and dark forests. The fog is so thick that none of them even see it until the hull of the ship crashes into the shoals. The impact jolts everyone awake. Baby Ragnar suddenly lets out a thin, reedy wail—the first sound he has made in over a week—and Torvi clutches him to her chest as she squints and tries to make out the outline of the shore.

They stumble off the ship and onto the beach, dazed and exhausted but somehow alive. Some of the others weep with joy but she finds she has no tears left to shed. When she finally sets foot on solid ground for the first time in weeks, she almost falls over. They make it barely a mile into the forest before they are discovered and surrounded by a band of men bearing arrows and spears. She steps forward and lifts her shaking arms in surrender.

She knows they must make a pathetic tableau—less than a dozen men, women, and children, all of them weak and starving—and so the people who found them take pity on them and give them food and animal skins and medicine. If they had come in greater numbers and with warriors, she is certain they would have had a less than favorable reception. But with the help of their new neighbors, they slowly regain their strength. Baby Ragnar learns to crawl; Asa befriends the village children and learns some of their language. When Torvi hears her daughter laugh for the first time in months, a great weight lifts from her heart.

_Happy_ , she tells their leader, Pekitaulet. Pekitaulet smiles and repeats the word. _Happy._

When spring arrives, she travels further, sometimes in the company of Pekitaulet’s people or her own, but often by herself. She climbs trees and wades through icy cold streams. She listens to the birds sing to each other and she sings back to them. She picks wildflowers to braid into Asa’s hair. She feels more alive than she ever has—and somehow more alone.

“This is not a new land,” she tells Othere one day in late spring. Their hunting traps have turned up empty, and so they instead have climbed a cliff overlooking the sea. The wind whips through her hair and stings her face. A storm is coming in from the ocean and will be here soon. “This land is as ancient as ours. It has its own gods and its own people. We will only ever be strangers in this place.”

Othere nods. “And yet here we are.”

“It is not right that Ubbe is not here to see this,” she says sadly. She hugs her knees and stares out at the gray sea as the first raindrops land on her head. “He should have been the one to carry out his father’s dream.”

Othere—the seer—says, “What if this was not Ubbe’s destiny, but your own? What if this place was not Ragnar’s dream, but yours? What then, Torvi Signesdottir?”

Torvi stares at him. The rain begins falling harder and thunder rumbles in the distance, so they hurry back to the village to take cover. She hugs her children close and listens to the sound of rain hitting the roof of their hut. She thinks of Ubbe, of Lagertha, of Bjorn. She thinks of Guthrum and Hali. She thinks of the world she left behind. She finds that she doesn’t miss it at all. _What then?_

If she cannot change her fate, she can still choose how to live. She finds herself suddenly weeping and she doesn’t even know why. Asa reaches up and touches her face. “It’s all right, Asa,” she tells her daughter as she wipes away her tears. “It’s all right.”

When the rain has finally stopped, she steps outside. The air is fresh and clean and the sun warms her face. Asa runs past her and spins around in a circle and giggles, and baby Ragnar in her arms coos in surprise when a droplet of rain lands on his nose.

Spring turns to summer and summer to fall and fall to winter, and before she knows it, baby Ragnar is a baby no longer and Asa has sprouted like a weed. Her son has Ubbe’s eyes and her daughter will someday have Bjorn’s height, but otherwise no one can deny they are all hers. They learn the ways of the gods of her old land and the gods of Pekitaulet’s people. They are bold and curious, but more than that, they are gentle and kind. They are everything she hoped they would be and more.

The people call her _Torvi the Wise_. She laughs and tells them _no, I have always been very foolish, but I am learning._ She lives and she lives and she lives.


End file.
